open source marketer and community manager

Month: January 2008

Why wait until summer to code and earn $3,000? Funambol has just announced the availability of a $3,000 bounty to develop a plugin to allow Funambol to run on Qtopia devices. Trolltech, the makers of Qtopia, was just acquired this week by Nokia and as a result, Qtopia will become more commonly used.

Trolltech and Funambol would like to make sure that Funambol software works on Qtopia, so we are happy to provide you with a free Trolltech Green Phone or OpenMoko phone, a free Trolltech SDK and, of ourse, Funambol software. This would involve developing a plug-in to sync PIM data (contacts and calendar to start with) and maybe push email later.

If interested, follow the procedure on the code sniper page and submit a proposal.

Developers looking for information on Funambol’s code should look at Funambol’s wiki and at code from other community contributions (like the Android plugin, for example or the simpler Jajah plugin).

Now, this is surprising: Nokia acquired Trolltech, makers of toolkit QT, GTK’s competitor. What surprises me is that Nokia is using GTK on its tablet products (the 770, N800 and N810). So now Nokia has a stake in many platforms: its own flavour of Symbian for its cell phones, GTK/Gnome on the internet tablets and now QT… for what? It’s hard to guess. Is Nokia interested in QTopia, the platform used in embedded devices, including the deadsold out Trolltech Greenphone?

I haven’t been updating the blog too much in the past week and the reason is that I have a new job as community manager at Funambol. The company develops the free/libre software Funambol application server (formerly known as Sync4j). The server allows mobile backup and PIM synchronization to contacts, calendars, tasks, notes and other data, push email (blackberry-like), mobile device management to manage cell phones remotely.’ Funambol also has clients for most cell phones available on the market.

The software allows also extensions, as plug-ins and connectors. One of my duties will be to help external developers to contribute plug-ins like the iPhone, Yahoo and Gmail connectors.

The office is in Pavia, which is 45 minutes away from my home in Milano. The company is located in Redwood, California, giving the international touch I like in this creative Italian venture.

I am already getting used to the new rhythm and in the next days I’ll start posting more regularly.